samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Nov 20 2007 | software, open source, linux"Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, today announced the availability of its Ubuntu JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) edition. Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced "Juice") is an efficient variant of the popular desktop and server operating system, configured specifically for virtual appliances... ISVs looking to develop virtual appliances will have a compelling platform in Ubuntu JeOS, an OS optimised for virtualisation that greatly reduces the complexity and maintenance overhead normally associated with general purpose operating systems."
Cool move - but why is the download link so hard to find!
- samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Jul 07 2008 | software, microsoft, free, open source
"They are systematic symptoms of a deeper wrong which most people don't recognise: proprietary software. Microsoft's software is distributed under licenses that keep users divided and helpless. The users are divided because they are forbidden to share copies with anyone else. The users are helpless because they don't have the source code that programmers can read and change."
Surprisingly reasonable, but there still isn't an particularly viable alternative business model. Support puts the focus in the wrong place, as do services often. Why is software different anyway; do we expect Coke to provide their recipe publically? Maybe our economic system is the issue...
- samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Jun 04 2008 | office, open source, mac osx, software
"The free office suite OpenOffice is now offering a beta of version 3.0 for testing and it's easier than ever for Mac owners to start using it right away. "
And still just as ugly, particularly on OSX. I wish they'd acknowledge that 1 interface for all platforms just doesn't work for applications more complicated than a few buttons. Even if they get the looks right (which they haven't), there are still subtle differences in UI guidelines.
- samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Mar 20 2008 | open source, security, software
"So says Jeff Waugh of open source advocacy group Waugh Partners, fed up after a series of personal attacks directed at the heads of government agencies... [after] adoption of open source software had been stalled by security concerns... While Waugh believes the open source model holds better security outcomes than its proprietary equivalent, he equally describes the vitriolic reaction to Gibson's comments as being 'disgraceful' and says they achieve nothing for the industry."
Indeed level-heads are what's needed in open-source. Plus it's kinda ironic they say people don't know enough about open-source, when many of them know nearly nothing about closed-source software.
ShareViewed: 1 Time - samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Feb 18 2008 | software, open source, development
"As a software developer, there's no denying that open source software is a powerful and transformative force in modern software development. The console model, and Apple's de-facto first party development model, are about as far as you can get from Mark's freedom zero-- instead, you get zero freedom... So I'll ask again, since Mark brought it up: why doesn't anyone give a crap about freedom zero? "
Some good comments here about the problem with open-source, and it's place in the wider scheme of things, before it degenerates into an Apple fanboy battle.
- samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Feb 03 2008 | open source, software, user interface
"We hear that the Mozilla Foundation is buying hiring three of the principle folks from Humanized, a small software user-interface shop in Chicago founded by Aza Raskin, the son of famous Apple interface designer Jef Raskin. Humanized has been working on improving the UI of both desktop and Web-based software, with projects like Enso and music search engine Songza."
If only more open-source initiatives would take Mozilla's lead and invest more into user-interface design...sighs.
- samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Nov 20 2007 | software, google, open source
"Google hopes to promote third-party mobile software development and foster a broad developer community on top of Android's Linux-based mobile platform... Although the underlying Linux kernel is licensed under version 2 of the Free Software Foundation's General Public License (GPLv2), much of the user-space software infrastructure that will make up the Open Handset Alliance's platform will be distributed under version 2 of the Apache Software License (ASL)."
Good analysis here, and a very smart decision by Google. At least one heavy user and contributor of open-source software realises that the world isn't open-source vs. proprietary (although that may be because a lot of Google's stuff is proprietary built on open-source code).
- samuel337 | Shared With: Everyone - Aug 06 2007 | web, software, open source
"IronMonkey, the project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin, so that Tamarin becomes multi-lingual, over time delivering high performance for all languages."
Wow, a major open source project using Microsoft code - who'd have thought that was possible. Good to see a project with some sense, and not just an attitude.
"ScreamingMonkey, the project to add browser-specific script-engine glue to Tamarin, enabling it as a <script> tag handler in other browsers, starting with IE."
This is pretty cool, a single JS engine over different browsers. One issue down, CSS and rendering to go.
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